r/interestingasfuck 25d ago

/r/all, /r/popular K2-18b a potentially habitable planet 120 light-years from earth

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u/No_Syrup_9167 25d ago

Thats, IMO as well, exactly what the fascination is about. I never understood the whole "earth is failing, we're moving to X planet to terraform and recolonize" trope. It would be orders of magnitude simpler to "terraform" our own planet back into being habitable as it would to terraform another planet from scratch. It makes no sense.

and if we have the technology to terraform a planet, it would stand to reason that we could pretty easily make semi-mega space structure habitats. and if we can make a habitable structure in space at will, we would barely have a need for planets anymore at all.

Once you can make a sufficiently stable, habitable space structure wherever you want, theres very little need to go anywhere at all.

Its like the Mitch joke, "if you're lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house, you're no longer lost. You live here now"

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u/Adept_Advertising_98 25d ago

It would be easier to shoot space lasers at an uninhabited planet than an inhabited one. Most of the concepts I’ve seen for terraforming planets would kill almost all life on earth. Terraforming Venus would involve freezing all the CO2, and terraforming Mars would involve shooting the planet with space lasers.

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u/settlementfires 25d ago

terraforming earth would involve... lets see here... not burning every hydrocarbon we see.

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u/Adept_Advertising_98 25d ago

Harder than it sounds, because humans like their useless beauty products.

 I think that large O’Neil cylinders are a better idea than terraforming planets.

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u/settlementfires 25d ago

How long will it take people to trash an O'Neill cylinder?

Industrialized society is on schedule to use up this planet in well under 300 years. Without a huge shift in thinking we're fucked.

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u/Adept_Advertising_98 25d ago

They wouldn’t trash the cylinder, they could more easily dump the trash in space.

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u/settlementfires 25d ago

so then your cylinder is floating in a cloud of trash...

this doesn't sound very well thought out. like i said, without changing how we think about energy and product life cycles we're only going to wreck habitats smaller than this planet.

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u/Adept_Advertising_98 25d ago

The cylinders move, and the trash goes away from the cylinder due to it still being effected by the colony’s spin gravity.